But what do you actually need? What really makes sense? It can be tough to keep track of it all.

For that reason, with this article we want to help you find the best WordPress hosting plan for your website. I will cover why it’s important to have a quality hosting provider, what different types of hosting are available, and how specialized WordPress hosting providers are different from standard hosting plans.

Furthermore, I will provide you with in-depth information on some of the best WordPress hosting providers in the industry. I will look at what features they have to offer as well as the pros and cons of each provider. Here are the 5 hosting providers, I will be taking a look at (click on logo below to directly jump to the review):

Finally, to gather some objective data on the quality of each host, I will run speed tests on a sample site for each hosting plan in this article. That way, we can all assess better what really hides behind the marketing claims of these companies.

Best WordPress Hosting

Since this is a long article and to make navigation easier on you, you can click the links in the table of contents below to directly jump to the part that’s most interesting to you. For the really time deprived among you, who just want to see the winners of the best WordPress hosting competition (based on performance), we have the abbreviated version right here:

Of course, you are also more than welcome to read the post in its entirety. I promise, it’s chock full of important information for anyone interested in finding the best WordPress hosting provider for themselves.

Why Do You Need a Hosting Provider?

If you are new to WordPress and building websites, the first question that might come to your mind is why you need a hosting provider at all. After all, wasn’t the promise of WordPress to get a free website? Why should you now have to pay money now to create one? Can’t you just skip this step?

Hosting Providers Give Your WordPress Website a Home

That’s a legitimate question. In theory, it’s absolutely possible to have a WordPress website without a hosting provider. You can have your site up and running online without paying someone for it.

But — and that’s a big but — only if you are willing and able to build and maintain your own web server. And while that’s in the realm of possibility, for most of us the cost and effort involved in doing so is in no way justified.

That’s exactly where hosting providers come in.

Basically, a hosting provider is someone who already has a number of web servers available and rents them out to other people. For a monthly fee they agree to house your site so others can access it through the World Wide Web.

One advantage of this practices is that economies of scale usually allow hosting providers to do this for much cheaper than you and I ever could.

Plus, hiring someone to take care of all the technical stuff involved with running a server is a huge burden off of the normal user’s shoulders. No need to acquire additional expertise if you can pay someone who already has it.

Clear so far? Good, I know I could count on you.

However, if all it takes is some server space, why not just go with the lowest price? I mean, we have all see the ads for cheap or even free web hosting. Can they be really that different?

Turns out, they can and there are many reasons to consider a higher-quality option.

Not all hosting providers are created equal. In fact, there can be severe quality differences between them, especially concerning:

Server speed

Available storage size

Reliability

Management options

Control

Support

Price

Why should you care about this? Because the quality of your hosting provider pretty much influences everything else about your website:

Safety and availability

Security and protection from hackers

Ability to recover from catastrophes

Loading time (and in turn user experience)

Search ranking

You can probably see how a lack in these areas can cost you a lot of time, energy and ultimately money. Resources that are better spent on improving and promoting your site.

Being successful online today is hard work and takes a lot of effort. Therefore, going with subpar hosting is like shooting yourself in the foot before attempting to run a marathon. Just not a smart strategy.

What Types of Web Hosting Are There?

To make matters even more complicated, we have several types of hosting to choose from. Which one of them is the right one for you really depends on your goals and the requirements of your site.

To give you a better understanding of what I’m talking about, let’s quickly review the different hosting options at our disposal and their standout features.

1. Shared Hosting

This type is usually the cheapest and, therefore, most popular solution for budding WordPress websites. Shared hosting means your site is located on a single server with several other websites who all share the machine’s resources among them.

While the price makes this option attractive, one major drawback is that you have no control over how those resources are managed. The more one site uses, the less is available for the rest. As you can imagine, this case of “bad neighbor syndrome” can result in serious speed problems once your site gets to a certain size.

2. Virtual Private Server Hosting

Next up is a modified form of shared hosting. With a virtual private server, your site still shares the same server with other properties, however, this time with firmly allocated resources. Disk space, memory and computational power are all divided evenly and can not be exceeded. Therefore, other parties will not be able to throttle your site’s speed.

3. Cloud Hosting

The principle behind cloud hosting is pretty neat. In a cloud hosting environment, you won’t only have one server hosting your files but several decentralized virtual servers that can change dynamically according to need. That means you can use as much or as little computing power as needed and change it on demand.

4. Managed Hosting

This type of hosting is a somewhat new addition to the group and one that has quickly become popular in the WordPress community.

A managed hosting provider gives you access to your own dedicated server but keeps the entire technical side in their hands. It’s basically like having your own system administrator who also hosts your site on his own computer. In managed hosting, you can fully concentrate on growing your website, while someone else takes care of everything on the server side.

As you will see below, we have more and more companies to choose from who specialize in providing WordPress managed hosting.

5. Dedicated Hosting

The next step up then is dedicated hosting. Here you get full control over your site’s server arrangements and an entire hosting environment for yourself to do with as you please.

However, one of the downsides here is that dedicated hosting is often quite pricey, in the realm of a few hundred bucks per month. Apart from that, you really need to know what you are doing. Dedicated hosting is geared towards sysadmin professionals and not advisable for beginners.

However, this kind of setup is also only necessary for really big websites with tons of traffic. The average user is probably better off choosing a shared or managed hosting option. Plus, you can always upgrade once you feel that your site requires extra care or dedicated resources to cater to its growing audience.

How Are WordPress Hosting Providers Different?

As I mentioned earlier, in the managed hosting category we have a growing number of providers who specifically cater to WordPress users. What that means is that their server architecture and service is optimized precisely for hosting WordPress websites. As you can imagine, that brings a number of benefits with it.

Increased Site Speed

With providers of managed WordPress hosting, the hardware and software is completely geared towards the WordPress platform. That means they offer stuff like server-level caching, optimal versions of PHP, MySQL and Apache as well as other WordPress-friendly features.

Hosting your site on such a server can reduce your page loading speed by as much as 1-2 seconds. While that doesn’t sound like much it, these are huge numbers in the online environment!

Improved Security

While WordPress is generally very security conscious, no website is a hundred percent protected from cyber attacks. That’s just what it is. For that reason, any host worth their salt will have some sort of security protocol in place.

However, the best WordPress hosting providers out there go the extra mile with increased security measures specially suited for the platform. Should your site still end up hacked (which can happen) they also have a lot more WordPress-specific knowledge on how to get it back on its feet than run-of-the-mill providers who host all kinds of site environments.

Complete WordPress Administration

One of the main reasons that makes managed WordPress hosting providers so attractive is that they not only take care of your server setup but also of WordPress itself!

Your provider will make sure you are running the latest and greatest version of WordPress and will also take care of the updating process for you. That way you can completely concentrate on content creation and running your site without giving a second thought to how to keep it stable.

Expert Support

Should you have a problem with your site, you will be talking to people who know WordPress inside and out instead of someone with half-knowledge on a number of different cases, setups and systems.

Priceless in a bind!

How We Set Out to Find the Best of the Best in Hosting

Alright, enough with the theory, let’s dive into our testing methodology. In the following we will try to find out who is the best managed WordPress hosting provider on our list. To do so I will look at a what features they have to offer and also run some tests to see how these providers perform in the real world.

The Test Setup

Firstly, all tests are conducted on a stripped-down test site with WordPress 4.4, filled with some default content and running the Twenty Sixteen theme. No caching and speed optimization plugins are present or enabled.

Performance Measurement Tools

To evaluate overall performance, I used Pingdom and GT Metrix to get numbers for page load time. I used servers in several different locations and ran multiple tests from each before calculating an average score. This will also give us an indication of how the user experience will vary for visitors from different parts of the world.

Evaluation Measures

Besides performance, I will also look at other measures that are important when choosing a WordPress hosting provider:

Price — Monthly price of the hosting plan I purchased for this experiment

Bandwidth — Traffic your site will be capable of handling

Storage Space — Amount of data space you will be allocated on the server

Number of Sites — How many sites you can host with the plan

While I will look at every provider in detail, each review is also followed by a summary of the findings. So, if you don’t have the time to read everything, this will give you a quick overview.

Also, be aware that this is a living list. Over time I will be adding additional entries to it, so check back every once in a while!

The Contenders for Best WordPress Hosting Provider

From here on out we will be dealing with the actual test results. You will find detailed information about our test subjects, how they performed during the test and a lot of other relevant information to make an informed decision.

1. SiteGround

SiteGround was founded by a group of university students in 2004. In its early days, the hosting company was run entirely from their dorm rooms. Today, it is one of the top web hosting providers in the industry and employs over 280 people.

They pride themselves in their focus on speed, security and excellent support. I can definitely second the latter. Two days after signing up for an account, I got a personal call from one of their representatives who welcomed me on board and asked if I needed any assistance. I was quite impressed!

All of their plans are also designed to protect sites from being hacked and SiteGround claims to have developed techniques that can make websites run over a hundred times faster!

Features

For the test, I signed up for their StartUp plan (the cheapest shared hosting plan), which includes regular features like a free domain name, 99.9% uptime guarantee and 24/7 technical support. It also comes with 10 GB of storage space, CloudFlare CDN, daily backups, access to cPanel and SSH – all rolled into a $9.95/month-package with a 30-day money back guarantee.

The StartUp plan is ideal for small-scale websites, blogs, and even e-commerce sites, however, once you start attracting more than 10,000 monthly visitors on a regular basis it’s advised to upgrade to the GrowBig plan.

Pingdom Test Results

Server Location

Load Time 1

Load Time 2

Load Time 3

Amsterdam

2.00s

1.93s

2.08s

Melbourne

4.16s

3.35s

2.95s

New York

2.70s

0.90s

1.09s

Average page load time: 3.53 seconds

GT Metrix Test Results

Server Location

Load Time 1

Load Time 2

Load Time 3

Vancouver

1.00s

0.90s

1.10s

Average page load time: 1.00 second

Summary: StartUp Plan

Number of sites: 1

Avg. Page load time: 2.27 seconds

Monthly Bandwidth: 10,000 visitors

Storage: 10GB

Monthly Costs: $3.95

Pros

Cost efficient hosting plans

Daily backups for enhanced security

24/7 technical support

99.9% uptime guarantee

Cons

2. FlyWheel

Flywheel has been around since 2012 and managed to gather a lot of positive reputation in a short amount of time. As their website states, the company is “built from the ground up for designers and creative agencies” and offers targeted special features for their clientele.

For example, Flywheel provides free migrations, one-click staging sites, automatic billing transfer for finished sites and a platform that scales with your agency. Whether you’re working for someone else or building your own website, Flywheel has got your back!

Features

Flywheel has tons of hosting plan options available. While that is generally awesome, the wide range of choices can also make selecting the right package for you a bit complicated.

Luckily, if you are unable to decide or not quite satisfied with their pre-designed packages, on request the Flywheel team will set up a custom plan for you. All you need to do is tell them your requirements and they’ll cook up something exclusively for your site.

For this test, I purchased their Tiny plan at $15/month which is good for one WordPress install. It can handle up to 5,000 visitors per month and gives you 5 GB of disk space.

Flywheel charges an extra $10 for CDN and SSL support (each!) which might be a deal breaker for some. However, all their setups are tuned specifically for WordPress which gives the company an edge over less targeted offers on the market.

Pingdom Test Results

Server Location

Load Time 1

Load Time 2

Load Time 3

Amsterdam

0.89s

0.87s

0.82s

Melbourne

1.60s

1.74s

1.44s

New York

0.69s

0.47s

0.44s

Average page load time: 1.49 seconds

GT Metrix Test Results

Server Location

Load Time 1

Load Time 2

Load Time 3

Vancouver

0.90s

0.80s

0.90s

Average page load time: 0.87 seconds

Summary: Flywheel Tiny Plan

Number of sites: 1

Avg. Page Load time: 1.18 seconds

Monthly Bandwidth: 5000 visitors

Storage: 5 GB

Monthly Costs: $15

Pros

Server setup targeted to WordPress

Ability to request a custom hosting plan

Blazing fast page load speed

Nightly backups and tight security

Cons

Charges extra for CDN and SSL support (free on other hosting providers)

3. WP Engine

Similar to Flywheel, WP Engine is a bit of a newcomer to the hosting landscape. The company started out in 2010 and has built quite the reputation for itself in a matter of just a few years by taking their tagline “WordPress hosting, perfected” quite seriously.

If necessary, WP Engine offers enterprise level WordPress hosting. All plans are optimized for speed and come with powerful security features. Their support staff is among the friendliest out there and always available to lend a helping hand.

Features

For WP Engine, I went with the Personal plan. It enables you to host a single WordPress website with 10 GB of space and supports up to 25,000 monthly visitors with unlimited data transfer – all for $29/month.

Prices are a bit steeper than other hosting plans but their included features make it worth it. If you think otherwise, you can always take WP Engine up on their 60-day money back guarantee.

The Personal plan includes staging, which means you can set up a live copy of your WordPress site for testing purposes. Incredibly useful to try out new themes and plugins. For an extra $19.99 a month, you can add CDN services to your plan and $49.99 will get you support for SSL.

Similar to Flywheel, WP Engine also offers the possibility to create free websites which can be easily transferred to paid accounts. Freelancers and creative agencies will appreciate it.

Pingdom Test Results

Server Location

Load Time 1

Load Time 2

Load Time 3

Amsterdam

1.09s

0.80s

0.79s

Melbourne

1.22s

1.35s

1.08s

New York

0.43s

0.39s

0.41s

Average page load time: 1.26 seconds

GT Metrix Test Results

Server Location

Load Time 1

Load Time 2

Load Time 3

Vancouver

0.80s

1.00s

0.80s

Average page load time: 0.87 seconds

Summary: WP Engine’s Personal Plan

Number of sites: 1

Avg. Page Load time: 1.1 seconds

Monthly Bandwidth: 25,000 visitors

Storage: 10 GB

Monthly Costs: $29

Pros

Unlimited data transfer on every plan

Site transfer to paid account for client sites

Enhanced speed and security measures

24/7 ticket support and live chat

Cons

4. Pressidium

Our next contender for best WordPress hosting services is Pressidium. Created by four coworkers with a vision of an industry-leading managed hosting service, the provider offers top-notch site management as well as fast, robust, scalable and secure WordPress hosting.

Features

Pressidium offers premium features on every plan, including a 60-day money back guarantee, free migration services and deploy of WordPress sites or blogs within 45 seconds.

I went with their Micro plan, which is good for one WordPress install and supports up to 10,000 visitors per month. The plan also features 5 GB of storage and Pressidium’s Enterprise Architecture. Staging, automatic backups and updates round off the package.

In case none of their standard plans meet your needs, custom plans are available for the more picky. Pressidium also doesn’t have any limitation on server usage. The company will charge you according to actual utilization – pay more only if you use more.

What’s quite refreshing is their brutal honesty when it comes to making promises. Their uptime guarantee is set at 99.95% and backed by the Service Level Agreement. For every hour Pressidium fails to meet this guarantee, you’ll get 5% of your monthly fee credited back.

Pingdom Test Results

Server Location

Load Time 1

Load Time 2

Load Time 3

Amsterdam

0.69s

0.56s

0.78s

Melbourne

2.81s

2.02s

2.18s

New York

1.25s

0.90s

0.90s

Average page load time: 2.02 seconds

GT Metrix Test Results

Server Location

Load Time 1

Load Time 2

Load Time 3

Vancouver

1.20s

1.20s

1.30s

Average page load time: 1.24 seconds

Summary: Pressidium Micro Plan

Number of sites: 1

Av. Page Load Time: 1.63 seconds

Monthly Bandwidth: 10,000 visitors

Storage: 5 GB

Monthly Costs: $17.90

Pros

Fast and reliable servers

Custom plans available

Cost efficient for the number of features

Service guarantee with money-back offer

Cons

5. Pagely

Created way back in 2006 by Joshua and Sally Strebel, Pagely offers managed WordPress hosting to anyone who no longer wants to put up with the technical aspects of running a WordPress site. Besides individual hosting packages, the company also offers virtual private networks and custom plans for enterprise clients.

Features

One of Pagely’s standout features is their state-of-the-art architecture. Case in point: their servers run on the CodeIgniter PHP framework while cyber-threat specialist Armor takes care of security matters. Aside from that, all hosting plans are powered by Amazon and come with PressCDN included.

For the purpose of this test, I signed up for Pagely’s Business plan that allows three WordPress installs on a total of 10 GB storage space. The package also has 10 GB of bandwidth allowance regardless of page views and site visitors. Automatic WordPress upgrades, backups, caching, and expert WordPress support from professionals round off Pagely’s excellent service.

Pingdom Test Results

Server Location

Load Time 1

Load Time 2

Load Time 3

Amsterdam

0.54s

0.55s

0.55s

Melbourne

1.98s

1.72s

1.39s

New York

0.69s

0.47s

0.46s

Average page load time: 1.39 seconds

GT Metrix Test Results

Server Location

Load Time 1

Load Time 2

Load Time 3

Vancouver

1.30s

1.10s

1.50s

Average page load time: 1.3 seconds

Summary: Pagely Business Plan

Number of sites: 3

Av. Page Load Time: 1.35 seconds

Monthly Bandwidth: 10 GB

Storage: 10 GB

Monthly Costs: $64

Pros

Enhanced security measures

Managed WordPress hosting from front to back

Cloud hosting

Free CDN, caching, backups and upgrades

Cons

6. Pressable

Pressable is also relatively new in the hosting game but claim to already be number one in customer satisfaction. They are another company offering only managed WordPress hosting and nothing else. While providing a range of plans, Pressable also has custom solutions available.

Features

In our quest to find the best WordPress hosting solution, I purchased Pressable’s 1-5 site plan. It supports up to 5 WordPress sites (surprise!) and can handle 15,000 monthly visitors.

All of Pressable’s hosting plans come with free CDN services, dedicated WordPress support and caching. The company also provides nightly malware scan and removal to ensure site security is top-notch.

With this provider, you also get SSL support and SFTP access out of the box. Since the company focuses on managed WordPress hosting, webmasters can expect daily backups and automatic updates.

Pingdom Test Results

Server Location

Load Time 1

Load Time 2

Load Time 3

Amsterdam

2.02s

2.22s

1.74s

Melbourne

3.20s

3.03s

2.62s

New York

0.97s

1.03s

1.04s

Average page load time: 2.98 seconds

GT Metrix Test Results

Server Location

Load Time 1

Load Time 2

Load Time 3

Vancouver

2.40s

1.80s

1.60s

Average page load time: 1.94 seconds

Summary: Pressable 1-5 Site Plan

Number of Sites: 5

Av. Page Load Time: 2.46 seconds

Monthly Bandwidth: 15,000 visitors

Storage: Not specified

Monthly Costs: $25

Pros

Free CDN, caching, backups and WordPress updates

Dedicated WordPress support

One-click creation of staging sites

Many features for an affordable price

Cons

7. Kinsta

Our next WordPress hosting provider is Kinsta. Founded by a WordPress developer, the company now has had over eight years experience in the managed WordPress hosting sphere. Lately, they are becoming more visible on the market. That and offices in both Los Angeles and London suggest it’s going well. Let’s see what they have to offer.

Features

For this test, I have chosen the Business 1 plan. It’s quite pricey with $100/month for one website (you get one month off when paying annually) and offers unlimited pageviews and visitors. The traffic limit is 50GB per month, however, that is plenty for most people. Plus, every additional GB costs $1, which is fair.

The plan includes 5GB storage on SSD and all Kinsta sites are hosted on Google Cloud. That also means you can choose from data centers in different places of the world. Of course, the closer your server is to your clients, the faster it can serve up your site.

Kinsta puts a lot of emphasis on support. Their staff consist of WordPress experts who regularly contribute to the platform and their average ticket response time is three minutes. Aside from that, they also offer free site migration from your old hosting provider.

Other features include one-click staging areas for testing (including daily backups), DDOS protection, SSL (including Let’s Encrypt), firewalls, automatic backups, and uptime monitoring. Kinsta will also fix your site for free if it has been compromised.

My first impression was also very positive. WordPress is very easy to set up and the backend is super fast, even quicker than the local installation on my computer. Only the media upload took a while.

Pingdom Test Results

(Quick note: We added this provider to the article later. The server locations are different because Pingdom has changed them since then.)

Server Location

Load Time 1

Load Time 2

Load Time 3

Amsterdam

1.5s

1.35s

1.48s

Melbourne

2.31s

1.95s

2.18s

New York

0.39s

0.38s

0.34s

Average page load time: 1.32 seconds

GT Metrix Test Results

Server Location

Load Time 1

Load Time 2

Load Time 3

Vancouver

1.02s

1.2s

1.3s

Average page load time: 1.17 seconds

Summary: Kinsta’s Business 1 Plan

Number of Sites: 1

Av. Page Load Time: 1.25 seconds

Monthly Bandwidth: 50 GB ($1 for every additional GB)

Storage: 5 GB

Monthly Costs: $100

Pros

Unlimited visitors and pageviews

Awesome support

State-of-the-art technology

Super fast for visitors close to server location

Cons

Overall Ranking and Conclusion

As website owners, most of us are dependent on finding a quality host. Very few can or even want to build their own server. However, hosting can be a complicated topic. Different types of hosting and a multitude of features and options make decisions difficult.

Performance is one of the more objective ways to look at the playing field and from the test performed in this article, our ranking looks like this:

While this is a good list to start from, finding the “best WordPress hosting provider” for you comes down to more than just page loading speed. Your budget, the number of available sites and other factors all carry weight in this matter.

Therefore, the speed ranking and other information in this article will provide you only with a good starting point. The decision is up to you. Luckily, you have a lot of good solutions to choose from.

All that’s left for me is to wish you all the best and ask for one small favor: When you do decide on a host, please be so kind to let the rest of us know about it so we can profit from your experience. Thank you!

Which hosting provider are you signed up with? Which type of hosting service do you prefer for your WordPress site? Let us know in the comments section below!

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2 comments

Thanks for the great roundup of hosting providers. I really enjoyed the fact that you included 2 hosting providers that I have never heard of: Pressidium and Pressable. It is refreshing to hear about new solutions that are available.

I currently have Bluehost shared hosting on my website. I have never had any issues with them (although I often read a lot about people having problems with them). I have been considering switching over to SiteGround since the price is comparable but the service seems to be better.

That being said, I have also considered making the big switch to managed hosting. I feel like the more I read about it, the better it sounds. But I wonder, do you think that using managed hosting should only be used on larger scale websites? Is it worth the extra cash you spend each month even if your website’s traffic is not too high? I’m curious to hear what you and others think.

Thanks again for a great post, I look forward to reading more from you!

Just another reader here… I’ve run my own servers for 10 years because I like the control. 😉 It started as an experiment for fun in my spare time, and mostly remains one, but I’ve had a bunch of startups and nonprofits ask for hosting, so its grown quite a bit. Last year I began taking higher priority clients, and I decided to put them on managed hosting because I liked the idea of a safety net. Since I only do a lot of this work in my spare time, I don’t like the idea of having to drop what I’m doing at a moment’s notice and pour in hours of research to figure out who hacked what or which update broke something else. Whether an engineer or not, if time is a factor and your uptime standards are stringent, its good to be supported by a team that knows your whole stack (meaning, every aspect of your site, like WordPress, not just the server) and whom you trust.

So I put my critical clients on Managed hosting, and I leave my smaller sites on my own servers. In practice, for the past 6 years I’ve had 99.9998% uptime which is higher than almost all commercial providers out there, but that’s frankly luck. If something bad happened, it could take me a while to get time to fix it. But because I control everything, nothing breaks without me breaking it (since I haven’t had any security issues). In contrast, the sites on Managed hosting have had a few issues, largely because their scale makes them more complex– but when something breaks I just send off an email and the fix is taken care of by someone else.

In general, I think that means one would be better off with Managed hosting only if any of the following apply:
(1) Their site’s uptime is critical, and they don’t have an engineering team to support it round the clock
(2) The cost is easily doable for the site owner and they prioritize complete peace of mind
(3) They’ve had performance or security issues on other hosting
(4) They’ve had a couple or more experiences being frustrated by their current hosting’s support
(5) Speed is a priority (and again, they’re not a server engineer capable of tuning their own VPS/server)

Summary: Undoubtably your site will be faster on a VPS than shared hosting, which (if not an engineer who can run their own VPS) means going with some kind of Managed host– be it WordPress specific or not. But I wouldn’t fix something that’s not broke. If you’re happy with your current speed and support, haven’t had security issues, and are paying less than (or comparable to) competitors… why switch?

Quick note on speed: if you’re not a developer, it can be hard to know what to expect and how to measure it. You can google tools like pingdom, GTMetrix, and webpagespeedtest… but still, its hard to use them to their fullest if you don’t understand what they’re telling you. A pretty good way around that if you suspect your site is slow: take advantage of the free migration and trial period with a managed host. They’ll set up a clone of your site on their service, give you the keys, and you can take it for a test drive– anywhere from 14 to 60 days usually. You can just test the two anecdotally. If you notice a worthwhile difference, decide if the cost is worthwhile. If you don’t, then even if the metrics are technically better on the Managed host, do you care?

One last bit of advice: demand the excellence you should expect, if on a Managed host. I’ve found a number of them to not be nearly as transparent, thoughtful, or respectful as they should be (which is no surprise at a vanilla hosting company, but should not be the case when paying a premium for service). If you don’t LOVE your support experience with a Managed host, they’re not doing it right, go elsewhere.

I recommend Flywheel or Pressidium if you go Managed. I have no ties to any of the companies.